


Tiger, Burning (The Iokheaira Remix)

by ehmazing



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, Backstory, Childhood, Gen, Mid-Canon, Remix, Seelie AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-13
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-05-21 21:45:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14923382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ehmazing/pseuds/ehmazing
Summary: Yang's mother taught her how to kill.





	Tiger, Burning (The Iokheaira Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Iokheaira](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13637544) by [CourierNinetyTwo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CourierNinetyTwo/pseuds/CourierNinetyTwo), [QuickYoke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuickYoke/pseuds/QuickYoke). 



> As a HUGE FAN of Ivory and Roman's Seelie AU, I was thrilled to receive their blessings to remix _Iokheaira_ from Yang's POV!! For more of this delicious universe, please check out [their other works in the Seelie AU series.](https://archiveofourown.org/series/360131)

Her first kill was a rabbit. Snared in a simple trap, its belly slit with her father’s favorite jade-handled dagger. Yang sunk her small hands into the pelt, soft fur mottled gray and brown like the forest floor, and wept.

“Why so many tears over your supper?” her father laughed and mussed her hair. “You’ve done so well, my love! You cut quickly and deep just as I taught you. He didn’t feel a thing.”

“Yang.” Her mother knelt to reach her, cupping her face between her hands. Her hunting gloves were apple red and worn soft in the palms. She brushed away the tears with her thumbs and kissed Yang’s brow. “I am proud of you. I want you to remember this: to honor that which you take. The rabbit will rest peacefully now because you have mourned him.” She smoothed Yang’s hair where her father had mussed it. “When we have no remorse for a death, we no longer know how to live.”

Yang ate the rabbit that night from a golden plate, roasted well and dressed in herbs. She obeyed her mother and remembered. She remembered the rich taste of the meat. She remembered the salty taste of her tears. She remembered the smooth handle of her father’s dagger, and the velvet fur between her fingers, and the warm grasp of her mother’s hand that led her home.

She remembered that despite the fullness in her belly, she still felt, somehow, a loss.

 

* * *

 

Yang’s greatest joy in life was to run. It did not matter how: with her feet tied in ruby-studded sandals through the palace halls; with her bare heels sunken in the fresh, rain-kissed grass; with her horse, its silver bridle gleaming, the wind stroking her hair into rippling waves of gold. She threw tantrums when her handmaids tried to plait her curls out of the way, pleading with her to keep them from tangling.

“Yang,” her father always sighed, “that’s not how a Court Lady would present herself.”

“Oh, let her wear it down,” said her mother, a smile glinting in her eye. “There’s no use taming her, Taiyang. She is a wild creature.”

Yang did not mind being a wild creature. She vastly preferred it to be Court Lady. Wild creatures could run and leap and throw off their bangles and slippers so they could feel the cool stone floors under their toes. Court Ladies could only sit in stiff chairs at dinner and whisper to each other behind feathered fans. Court Ladies looked coldly at her father, hissing his name as if it were a deadly curse, all the while they bowed low to her mother and kissed every ring on her fingers.

Yang knew what a Court Lady was, but she did not know what a Queen was. How could she make the distinction? Her mother was already the center of her world. It only made sense that she would be the center of everyone else’s. Her father was different. He was a prince, she was told, but the Summer Court had many princes. Yang did not see anyone stepping around these other men, or stopping their conversations when they entered a room. Her father must be some other kind of prince entirely, some category not yet named.

“And me?” she asked her mother once. “If you are a Queen, Mother, what am I?”

“Questions, questions,” her mother tutted, slipping the bangles back over Yang’s feet. “Can the leaf tell itself apart from the tree? Does the pit of a peach know it can become a new fruit?”

“No,” Yang said firmly. Then, considering, “Yes?”

Her mother laughed. “I am a Queen,” she said, “and you are my daughter, my fearsome beast.”

Her father the prince gave her golden hair and tawny skin. Her mother the queen gave her new boots, peach-yellow leather that hugged her calves, to go running in. When the Court Ladies giggled across the table from her and whispered “bastard” she paid them no mind, for she had no idea of what a bastard was and every idea of what a fearsome beast was. Fearsome beasts looked at Court Ladies and growled.

“One day, Yang,” her father always, always sighed, “you will need to behave yourself. You will need to bring honor to the Court you were born to.”

Could the leaf tell itself apart from the tree? Yang didn’t know. She ran and ran. She had no title of her own to live up to yet. She was only her mother’s daughter.

 

* * *

 

In her land, summer was eternal. The endless, heavy heat gave way only to thick thunderstorms that cracked the sky with lightning and pelted rain against the bronze tiles of the palace roof. The harvest was always ripe, the grass always green. Crickets and frogs serenaded throughout the nights, will-o-the-wisps darted through her mother’s lantern-lit garden parties, and jewel-colored birds sang as they plucked dark grapes from the vineyards.

It was paradise. It was all Yang had ever known.

When the Winter Court first came, it brought change.

Yang was dressed in her best gown, a tiara forced atop her hair, and ordered to stand with her father and say not a word. He held her hand tightly in his own as the strangers entered the throne room, those northern ghosts in silver maille. One approached the thorn-covered throne and knelt to kiss her mother’s hand. Their white hair was pinned back with long, crystalline needles—or that’s what she took them for. Yang had never before seen ice.

“Lady Winter,” her mother said, pulling her cloak a little more securely around her shoulders. A great chill had entered the palace with the visitors. “You have grown quite beautiful, like your mother. I grieve with you and your Court for her loss.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty. We are honored.” The ghost rose and rejoined the rest of the party. Steam rose where she stepped, as if the Summer Court’s very air was trying to fight against this cold invasion. “I am sorry that funeral preparations forced my father to postpone his own journey to your fine lands. I am here in his place to honor the alliance between us, as agreed, and hope Your Majesty will not take his absence as insult.”

“It is no insult, of course.” Yang watched her mother smile even as she shivered. “You are of majority, after all, so I am glad to welcome Silburne’s Heir in his name. Perhaps when my own Heir is of age, she might accompany me on my return visit to the Winter Court and repay your favor.”

Her father’s grip on her hand became painful as the ghost’s eyes turned on Yang. They were a piercing blue and framed by white lashes. A churning, freezing feeling shot through Yang’s blood. She fought against the tremors that wracked her knees. She thought, suddenly, that this ghost was a hunter, and she was trying to make Yang into a rabbit.

That would not do. Yang met the ghost’s gaze and fixed her feet firmly on the ground. Her blood felt suddenly warm and strong again, her stomach untying its knots. The ghost’s blue eyes widened—she flinched. The steam rose thicker around her ankles as she looked quickly back at the Queen.

“Perhaps,” Yang’s mother said, rising from her throne, “we may start with a tour of the palace wine cellar? It is cooler down there and should be more to your comfort, Lady Winter.”

“As you wish, Your Majesty,” the ghost said with a bow and a sweep of her white fur cape. When the group passed Yang and her father, she ignored them entirely.

 

* * *

 

Yang did not know the ghost’s mother, the queen consort who had died. But death lingered long after the Winter Court’s stay ended. Death came hunting for her mother: silent, patient, and hidden from sight until it readied the killing blow.

It stalked her slowly.

“No, my love, not today. I am tired. Find your father and he may go with you instead.”

It stalked her relentlessly.

“No, my love, there will be no feast this year. We will have a better one next year, when your sister has joined us.”

It stalked her cruelly.

“No, my love, you must not come too close. I have a fever and do not wish for you to catch it. Take my hand, Yang—there, sweet girl, see? I can still hold you.”

It had been months since the ghosts rode away on their great, saddled bears, but her mother shuttered every window and drew every curtain, stoking the fires until the palace was blazing with heat as if to keep out some phantom frost. She wrapped herself in velvet blankets and hid away in her quarters, her belly swelling round as her face grew pale and thin. At first Yang’s father took her to visit a few times a day, but then it dwindled to once a day, and then she was forbidden from even entering the corridor.

“Your mother needs her rest,” her father said every night when Yang asked to see her, tucking the quilt under her chin. “You will see her again soon, my love, and your new sister too.”

She was young; she could not tell the difference between a hopeful promise and a lie.

Months passed. Storms gathered in the sky over the palace, thunder rumbling like a thousand drums overhead. Nursemaids flooded the corridor when her mother began howling. Yang tried to get in, to witness the arrival of her sister, but her father thrust her into the arms of a page and ordered her to be taken to the northern tower and occupied until it was over.

Yang never saw her mother again.

 

* * *

 

She planned to kill Ruby.

It was the only way it made sense to her. Ruby had come, and her mother had died. If Ruby died, it seemed only natural that her mother might return. It was a child’s logic—Yang was still less than a half-century old. Ruby cried and it echoed through the halls, a mourner’s lament, and Yang hated her because Ruby did not know the mother she cried for was the mother she had killed.

She found her father’s jade-handled dagger. The handmaids didn’t see her; they were dressing her mother’s bier with flowers, every flower that bloomed in the realm. You could smell it for miles, sickly-sweet, masking decay. The fields of the Summer Court were always blooming, always fat with fruit and plenty, but now the smell of buds turned Yang’s stomach. She wondered if she could ever be hungry again.

She slipped off her boots and bangles. It was easy, so easy. She wound through the halls, the knife warming in the grip of her hand. A turn here, a doorway there, and there was her sister, newly-born, wailing for her mother, newly-dead.

She crept to the cradle. She looked down upon the infant girl, red-faced, dark-haired, skinny legs kicking. She raised the dagger.

“You must cut quickly and deep. Or she will feel it.”

There was a woman where there had been no woman before. Yang clutched the dagger, blade flashing in the candlelight, just barely catching her scream in her throat.

“Come now, that’s no defense.” The woman was dressed in hides and fur, bone plate tethered across her arms and chest. Her hair was wild, studded with knots and beads, curling around her shoulders in a thicket of black curls. She stood over the cradle and looked down at Yang. Her red eyes burned. “If you hold your arm that way, you will slow your strike. I will be too fast for you.”

Yang said nothing. Ruby cried on.

“Well, go on then.” The woman nodded at the cradle. “Finish what you came to do. But then you must face me and kill me too.”

Yang glared. “No I don’t,” she growled. “I don’t know you.”

“You should,” the woman said. “A Queen must know everyone. What if you let me live after you killed the Princess here? I could be her cousin, or her servant, or a lover. I could ride away from here knowing Lady Yang slit Lady Ruby’s throat. I could raise an army in her name. And in another century or so, I could ride back to slit your throat too.”

“You wouldn’t.” Yang’s fingers wrapped around the jade handle so tightly that they hurt. “I’ll be stronger then.”

The woman tilted her head, considering. “Perhaps,” she said, her voice low. “Perhaps not.”

With a swift movement, she sprang forward and seized Yang’s arm, twisting it behind her back. The dagger clattered to the floor. Yang yowled in pain, her shoulder wrenched upward, one knee forced to the ground. Tears welled in her eyes, her mouth filled with the taste of salt.

“Face me,” the woman ordered. “Kill me. Kill me and prove yourself a true Queen.”

“I can’t,” Yang sobbed. Her other knee buckled, her legs sinking to the cold floor. “I can’t.”

“Kill me.”

“I can’t!”

The woman threw her down. Yang’s hair fell in tangles around her, the ends prickling at her cheeks as she cried. Two worn black boots stepped in front of her, a scarred, dirt-stained hand reaching down for her father’s dagger.

Yang launched herself at the woman’s knees. The surprise was enough to knock the woman to the side, her head slamming against the floor with a sickening crack. She cried out and the dagger dropped from her hand only to be snatched up by Yang. Her palms were slick with sweat now but she flung herself over the woman, pinning her shoulders under her knees. There was a fat bruise blooming at the woman’s temple. Her red eyes went wide as Yang crouched over her, the point of the blade aimed at the soft underside of her jaw.

The woman’s breath was hot on Yang’s face, her skin pale enough to show the webbing of blue veins on her eyelids. Her throat bobbed and brushed the edge of the dagger.

Yang memorized every inch of her face. She vowed to remember. Then she stood up.

“Go away,” she said.

The woman rolled slowly onto her side, one hand massaging her head. “Coward,” she spat. “If you can’t take even one life, you’ll never rule this Court.”

Yang walked over to the cradle. Ruby’s pink skin was soft. Her tiny hand gripped Yang’s finger and slowly, hiccupping, she quieted.

“You have to honor the lives you take,” Yang said. “I don’t know you, and I don’t want to honor yours.”

In a flash the woman was on her feet, her hand on the pommel of a longsword Yang hadn’t paid attention to, barreling forward and snarling, _“You insolent little—”_

Heat—furious heat, the heat of a blade pulled from the forge, the heat of the sun at its apex burning down at midday—coursed through Yang’s veins, burned up beneath her skin, scorched her heart and her lungs and her eyes and spilled out. Every candle flame in the room leapt to the ceiling as the woman flew backward, slamming against the wall. Within seconds the curtains were ablaze, smoke blanketing over the scent of roses.

The woman put a hand to the back of her head where it had hit the stone wall. It came away smeared with blood.

“Go away,” Yang ordered again. Sparks thrummed in her belly. She turned to the crib and fumbled Ruby into her arms.

When she turned around again, the woman was gone.

At the funeral, she placed a single peach pit on her mother’s bier. Her father wept and wept and no one looked at him coldly. Ruby slumbered through it all. Yang kept the dagger tucked into her belt—for the day that Ruby would face her, if it came to that. She would give her sister the chance to be stronger.

 

* * *

 

The centuries passed. Ruby’s dark hair grew long, her legs limber, her soft hands calloused where Yang taught her to hold a blade, to cut quickly and deep. She grew beautiful, like her mother. She was beginning to make a worthy huntress: silent and patient. She hid from the handmaids and snuck into Yang’s quarters, pulling at her sleeve and begging her to abandon her lessons, abandon the throne just for a quick game, a quick race.

“Come on, Yang,” Ruby said, “let’s run!”

Yang slipped off her boots and bangles. They ran and ran. When their father caught them, they were scolded, but it was no use. They were wild creatures. They were fearsome beasts.


End file.
